Fusion 360 Form Mastery - Part 1 - How to Create a Form Body #Fusion360 #Tsplines #Forms

in this video we're going to learn the various ways that we can use to create form bodies [Music] hey everyone this is matt with learn everything about design and i decided to kick off a new series that's specifically focused on mastering the forms workspace now we've already done a couple of introduction to forms in the fusion 360 course we have talked about forms in our subaru wrx and our ferrari 308 series and i really think that actually attempting to model something complex like that is a great challenge but i also wanted to come back a little bit and focus on some of the basics so we have a good foundation for building anything not just trying to follow along making a car so we want to get started by first downloading the form creation data set that you can find in the description of the video it looks pretty blank but there is one construction plane and there's a whole bunch of sketches in here the first thing that we want to do is we want to start by going into create form when we go into create form we have the create drop down that allows us to sketch directly in here and we've already taken a look at creating planes and we've also looked at some of these other primitives in the past so i want to focus on some of the differences between using these form tools for things like extrudes and revolves and how those relate to creating surfaces or solid bodies with them i also want to talk about this option pipe which is pretty cool and something that can be very useful depending on the types of things you want to model but first let's get started understanding the basics of some of these what are considered boolean operations so first let's go ahead and take a look at our sketches and we'll start with extrude when we take a look at extrude you'll probably have to zoom out and you'll note that this is a fit point spline and it looks kind of like a bean now the reason that we want to take a look at this for an extrude is because there's a unique thing that happens when we use extrude and form bodies we're going to select our profile and then we're going to begin pulling this up one thing that you can see here is that the outside profile of our spline is not exactly matching the shape of our extrude and this is really down to the number of divisions that we have you'll notice that the spacing is based off of curvature which means that in areas where we have high curvature the edges will be closer together and areas of low curvature they'll be further apart if we change this to uniform it gets even worse it's not even close to matching our shape so we do want to stick with the curvature spacing or displacement of these edges then the next thing we want to note is the number of faces now the spline was originally drawn with one two three four five six seven and i believe there might be an eighth one in there seven or eight spline points but that doesn't translate to the number of faces that we have when we think about these splines let's go ahead and hit cancel on this when we think about these splines we really need to think about the way in which they're created so this spline again was done with the fit point spline if we go into a control point spline and we try to match this same shape we're going to have to come up and then back in and back down and come back around and that looks pretty close we want to make sure that we do close this off with tangency and this actually might mean that you have to take this handle and this handle and make them co-linear but you can see that now we can sort of manipulate these around and we can get close to that same shape i am making it a little bit offset or different but one thing that you'll note is the number of points that we have or really the number of faces between them we've got 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13. so we have 13 in that case but the original fit point spline was really looking at points on the surface or on the curve so the difference between that original one using extrude and the one that we drew with the the different type of spline is that we had more faces so if we increase this to 13 you'll notice that now our spline is a little bit closer to the form body it's not perfect but it's getting much closer we can increase this until we get it as close as we need for whatever we are trying to design now the problem that we run into here is that in order to get this shape we're starting to add a lot of divisions now we're up to 25 which means that controlling the shape is going to be much more difficult so if you're trying to create a shape like this based off of a sketch that's a spline it's you're really starting off going down the wrong path because the end result is going to have way too many edges or vertices to have good control i'm going to say okay and create this thing but just note that this method of using extrude for a form body already starts you off on the wrong foot just because of the level of control next let's take a look at a sweep profile and a sweet path if we were going to do this with solid or surface bodies it's pretty straightforward we pick our profile we pick our path and then we create our surface or solid body this works actually pretty well when we're talking about form bodies you will notice that we do have issues where we have some overlap and in the case of doing this with either a surface or a solid body that would instantly become a failure that would cause it to be self-intersecting however with form bodies it allows us to do this what we can do is we can begin manipulating these curves by double clicking on them maybe rotating them and pulling them just slightly and we can adjust these curves just so that way we don't have that overlap we can move things around and then we have this curve here we can potentially pull this down and if we go back to smooth display that still looks pretty good but using the sweep type of function inside of the form tools allows us to get something that's more of a uniform pipe and we don't run into some of the same headaches that we do when we're using things like surfaces or solids because it won't allow those self-intersections whereas in the form workspace we can have overlapping form edges and vertices it's not good practice but these are things that we can actually use the form tools to fix so sweep gets a thumbs up for me extrude is kind of a picky one you need to really be using straight lines or arcs and be really careful with the curvature because it can get pretty ugly pretty quickly the next thing that we want to talk about is going to be revolve so let's take a look at revolve we're going to go to create revolve we're going to select our profile and then we're going to select the axis of revolution so this one again you can see has the same problem that we had with the sweep we had some straight lines in this profile and we also have a bunch of arcs there are no splines here but in order to match the curvature we're going to have to start changing the number of faces so if we take this up to say 15 around and let's take this up to 25 now we're starting to get closer to the actual shape in this case we have a benefit because we can include circular symmetry but that symmetry is based off of the number of faces that we have here so for example if we use four then we're dealing with a quarter if we use eight we're still dealing with a quarter but now we have these um eighth inch division or eighth divisions so you can see that this is again it's a valid method but we have to be extremely careful with the level of detail that we have you can see that the number of faces or divisions under here is extremely high because of that 25 and the more that we drop down the further and further away we get from that original profile if we go down to something more manageable say 10 it's not even close to the same shape so depending on what the end goal is something like this shape is really better suited to something like a solid or a surface revolve we can certainly deal with it in forms it's not something that we can't do but when we're talking about really truly matching the shapes that we need the number of divisions that we need for a revolve like this it's going to be at least 8 around the perimeter and in this case it's looking like 25 or 26 is going to get as close to that actual shape of the profile so again it can be done but then we run into issues of how are we going to control this thing we're going to have to go in and add symmetry in this case we probably don't want to add circular symmetry we might want to add mirror and i can just pick faces across and determine whether or not i have a mirror line but again it becomes a much harder challenge for us to control the next thing that we want to look at is loft and for this one we're actually going to bring back the extrude and we're going to go and loft between those as well so again we're gonna just go to create loft we need to pick our profiles and because they're not connected they'll automatically be created as a start and an end or a profile one in profile two then we can determine the spacing if it's going to be curvature-based or if it's going to be uniform and you'll notice that as soon as i do that when we make it curvature-based look at the number of divisions we have it's based off of this deviation and this deviation slider is going to determine how close to that original shape we want to get or we can use uniform and manually increase the number until we get a little bit closer so you'll notice that this method again what's going to happen is we're going to have a lot of divisions we ended up with 13 and because of that the shape becomes much harder to control so if you're starting with a shape that is already smooth you're working with splines or you're working with a lot of arcs just generally making some sort of starting sketch or profile that is smooth that is likely going to point you more towards using a surface or a solid tool in the design workspace than it would than starting out with these form tools so now that we've taken a look at those different methods let's also talk about pipe now pipe is an interesting one and i made this sort of box sketch in 3d and this sketch contains an outside sort of rectangular box and then i've got lines between in the center and this is really where the pipe tool shines and we're going to take a look at this but first we're going to modify the global diameter i'm going to make it 10 just to make it a little bit smaller then we're going to begin selecting paths so when i do this you'll notice that it looks like a cube and that's because it's in box display mode we can switch to smooth display mode and we can continue adding profiles so for example if i move my way over to this side let's go ahead and rotate this around a little bit and just begin connecting these you can see that i'm building this sort of pipe structure now this is extremely helpful if this is the starting point that you need for whatever it is you're designing if you're trying to make an organic looking tube structure or frame or trying to make some sort of custom lattice then you can do that we also have the ability to sort of make these connections and you can see that i'm doing this by again using the sketch where i have that single node in the middle where this becomes problematic is when we start to add too many we get these situations where we start to have pinches now we can take care of this a few different ways first we can go to the segments and we can reduce the number of segments reducing the number of segments is still going to give us a very similar shape the corners will be more rounded but we also have less to worry about with these intersections we can also do things like display the curve splits and when we display those splits you can see here that we've got four curves intersecting here and we can actually adjust some of these values on the fly so for example i can increase or decrease the number of segments in certain areas this one has eight i can increase those if i want to get more control in the areas where we have these intersections and again we've got on-screen manipulators and we can also manually increase those values but the curve splits are showing us how many we have coming together now 8 is going to be more than we really want to handle that's going to be really complicated and 4 is probably okay but again it's going to be problematic so if you are planning on using this tool the way that i suggest doing this is to create this pipe structure and then really think about the way in which all of these things are intersecting what we can do is we can double click to select sort of these edges and these loops that go around and we can delete some of them and we can begin sort of changing the way in which this control happens so again if i start deleting some of these edges i can begin removing some of these pinch points that are created and really changing the way that this thing blends so once i get rid of those and go back to a home view you can see that now if we remove the edges using control or command 4 we're starting to get a little bit smoother division we still have some pinches in some areas that we need to deal with but these can be found by going to box display and you can see how the box display is twisting these four-sided patches are actually not truly four-sided so these are things that we need to come back and potentially weld vertices to clean up some of this geometry we can weld these together and you can see really down far in here it's kind of hard to tell but it looks like there might even be two vertices there but again these are things that we're going to have to manually correct and work at to figure out what the best way is for us to get the resolution that we need and the shape that we need so if we go back to a smooth display you can see that we inherited some additional problems but these are all things that can be fixed so again takes a bit of time but this is kind of a cool technique for us to use especially if we are trying to create something that is a little bit more organic using the tools that we've already explored and we will talk about more in this course such as insert point will allow us to go back and recreate those divisions to add those additional controls back in once we have the shape that we've started with and we're happy with it then we can go back and we can start to divide these up and and add that control back in so i'm going to just do that real quickly on this model so we can see rotate it around make sure that i do have that vertex we'll go to this one this one and we'll go back up to the top so now we've sort of broken those back up we can use additional tools like modify edit form i'm going to go to the top and i'm going to scale these because i selected ones on either side and sort of push them out and when i look at this in smooth display you can see now that we're getting a little bit better result it's going to take time but those intersections are really tricky and something that pipe doesn't really do well it doesn't handle those well and again you do have control inside of the pipe tool when you're creating this to sort of work and manipulate this but it's going to take a little bit of manual work if you try to go too extreme with this so if you're trying to connect more than i'd say about three intersections then you're really going to have to spend a lot of time working on those intersections manually not not the end of the world but again it's still another method and lastly i do want to mention that we have already talked about some of these primitives we've used face and plane before box is a standard one that people start with cylinders one that we've used before as well and each of these sort of have their own benefits when we look at the difference between a quad ball for example i'm going to go ahead and just make a quad ball here and we go ahead and we take a look let's go ahead and expand our bodies i accidentally finished the form so let's go back into it let's hide all these other ones so when we take a look at the quad ball and we want to look at the differences between quad ball and sphere let's go ahead and just make a sphere over here we really get down to the difference in the way they're divided now if you see all these ghosted images it's because the surfaces are manually displayed here and i can go back and i can just hide them back in the design workspace then i can hide them as bodies here and their ghosted images won't show but we can see here that the way that these two are divided up is very different now at on the surface of it it looks like they are the same shape if we were to use control or command four they they look the same but there are some inherent differences and the reason why you would choose one over the other really depends on your end goal in general and i've mentioned this before and we'll talk about this in the next video but in general we want to avoid three sided or more than four-sided patches so anything that's considered an n-gon an n-gun is going to be a patch that has five sides or more or these triangle patches these generally give bad geometry where they intersect now when you first make the sphere it looks fine but as soon as we begin to manipulate it that's when we get into trouble if we were to try to select this vertex at the center you can see that it's really difficult so i'm going to move over to vertex selection and i begin moving it out you'll notice that it's not actually connected to the rest of them that center wasn't welded by default which means that this is going to give me a really poor result as soon as i start to manipulate it so in most cases unless you are actually going to remove the top and the bottom of these so for example if i just select and delete those triangles so unless you're going to do something like this and work with it truly as the spherical shape i would aim to use a quad ball and of course generally i will start manually by using either a face or a plane and that'll be my starting point and when we get started modeling something that's exactly what we're going to do we're going to use either a face or a plane the last thing i do want to note is that we have a mix of solid and surface bodies here and the reason that we have a mix of solid and surface bodies is because when we created these different surfaces using the form tools if they were open surfaces they're converted to a surface back in the design workspace if they were completely closed like the quad ball then it's going to turn into a solid body that's true for things like the pipes so that is a solid structure that's also true for things like the revolve the revolve was completely enclosed so this right here has turned back into a solid body anything that was left open like the sweep the extrude or the loft these are all coming in as surfaces and then we could use additional tools to cap them off and turn them into solids things like patch we can patch the top we can patch the bottom and then we can stitch all three of these together and fusion will automatically take those assuming they're closed and turn that into a solid body you can see now we've got that solid body it'll show up as a solid here but again there are inherent problems in some of these processes and just essentially through practice through figuring out what works for the types of things you're modeling you'll figure out what is going to be your go-to type of form for me it's going to be the cube so the box or the cube is generally the primitive that i start with and then i can sort of work from there to create anything i need and also using again either a plane or a face if i'm modeling something more complex like a car then i'll start with a single face and i'll build off of it from there gives me a lot more control than having to work with a body like this so hopefully that was a good introduction into how we can create different form bodies using various base sketches and really what the implication of that is downstream what i plan to do from here is to continue on with this series talking about some of the basics the understanding behind how to get started creating form bodies and what some of the basics or the ideas are behind that we're not going to be using any references or blueprints or sketches behind the scenes we're going to start from scratch and we're going to learn the process of manipulating it without having to focus too much on matching a predefined shape so we're going to get started in the next video by creating something brand new from scratch and learning some of those basics that we want to follow if you have any questions please let me know as always thanks for watching and we'll see in the next one you

Channel: Learn Everything About Design

Views: 20,003

Keywords: Fusion 360, Fusion 360 forms, form modeling, subd, subdivided, topology, tspline, surface modeling, cad

Id: KThyzlM_UFw

Length: 21min 36sec (1296 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021